


Humanity Was Never An Option

by Chaostructure



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28648953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaostructure/pseuds/Chaostructure
Summary: Revenant struggles with the duality of his consciousness as a sentient machine, and the human brain upon which that consciousness was initially built.
Kudos: 12





	Humanity Was Never An Option

_ You deserve rest and relaxation! Travel to seven different planets on an interstellar cruise and enjoy gourmet meals and a spectacular view of the galaxy as you go on a journey to find yourself. _

_ We get it: There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want. _

_ Meet attractive, like-minded singles when it’s convenient for YOU! _

The young man rolled his eyes at the obnoxious onslaught of advertisements playing over the diner’s holographic televisions. He was seated at a corner table with a clear line of sight to the door, after having assessed the exit points to the building on his way in. His left hand was idly stirring a steaming mug of coffee, but his attention was trained on the commlink device held in his right-- it was the disposable sort, pre-loaded with a set allowance of data. Any time now, he should be receiving a file with the information he’d need to hunt down his next mark.

He ran a hand through his light brown hair; brushed the smallest speck of dirt from his maroon vest. Waiting was setting him on edge. He needed to  _ do something. _

The content of the advertisements agitated him further. Though no one cared for commercials, the content was meant to be things that people - like the citizens having their breakfast in this diner, like  _ himself _ \- could universally relate to. Like so many things said to be fundamental to life as a human being, he found them thoroughly unrelatable. 

How could anyone  _ possibly  _ enjoy doing nothing? Everybody that he crossed paths with, it seemed, was impatient to end the work day so that they could get home and lounge in a cushioned chair with their feet up. He despised idle periods-- such as the one he was contending with right now. He could feel restless energy building inside of him. It made him feel hot and uncomfortable, and felt as though it would surely explode through his body if he didn’t have some kind of productive activity to channel it into. Of course, there were discrepancies between the average person’s idea of  _ productive activity  _ and his own, as well. 

Finding yourself, finding your purpose; that was another common point of philosophical discussion among his fellow man. He, however, had known and felt his purpose for as long as he could remember. Relationships? Family? They didn’t factor into it. That was, perhaps, the single most notable difference that separated him from the rest of humanity.

That, or the drive to take human life into his own hands.

He was a mercenary. That was his purpose; the one that had been with him for as long as he’d been capable of conscious thought. It was always there for him, guiding him. He’d never felt a need for human companionship-- in fact, he felt intense confinement when another person tried to push some kind of emotional connection onto him. It was a sort of interference that got in the way of that purpose, that directive-- the sole reason for his existence on this run-down dump of a planet in the Outlands.

The commlink device in his hand beeped. 

_ Ah, finally,  _ he thought as his thumb flicked the button that would open the unread message. Before the file had fully loaded in, a deafening  _ BOOM  _ sounded from somewhere further up the street. Reacting on instinct, the young man let the commlink device fall to the ground, clasped his hands over his ears, and opened his mouth so the pressure wave that came next wouldn’t blow out his eardrums. A fraction of a second later, the windows of the diner shattered, broken glass cutting through the air and tearing into the flesh of unfortunate patrons caught in its path. 

The screaming started, predictably-- like clockwork, the panic, rushing, people tripping over one another in a panic to get out of an area they now felt unsafe within. Fire roared outside the north windows. Several steel beams from the targeted building broke free under the strain of structural damage and fell through the roof of the small diner, exposing live wires and crushing human beings beneath them.

The sandy-haired mercenary was unaffected by the chaos. From his position in the corner, he was safely out of the path of window glass and falling rubble. Moreover, the exigent conditions around him did nothing to make him feel more unsafe than he always felt. It was the drawl of everyday life that caused him unease; the unspoken rules of social interaction, the expectation to fit in among  _ humanity _ \-- a condition that he’d never felt himself to be a part of.

To him, this turmoil felt like home. It was predictable. It was familiar.

He moved swiftly across the ruined floor, not slowed or deterred by the pained cries or bloodstains that he walked past-- not even a severed foot sitting in a heap of pulverized concrete could distract him from his focus. 

From the countertop he’d climbed on top of, he called out: “If you can walk, move outside and form rows to the right of the door! Do  _ not  _ block the door; civil response teams will need access in and out of the building.”

People around the room looked up at him, seemingly frozen in place. Was it possible that they appeared even  _ more  _ terrified than they had when the neighboring building exploded? It was as though they could sense that he didn’t belong-- he wasn’t one of them. 

He was something else, forced into the body of a human.

Finally, they began to follow his command. The less critically injured stood, helped each other up, and made their way outside, leaving behind those who were unable to move. He systematically approached them one at a time, in order from the southwest corner of the diner moving north, then east. 

The first person he looked over had blood spurting from between their fingers, which were pressed over a deep wound on their other arm. The young man ripped a cloth belt from a jacket that had left behind as people fled. That would work as a tourniquet-- he tied it around their arm, above the wound, and pulled it as tight as he could. 

Their pained screams did not faze him. He remained expressionless, devoid of emotion, and continued to work.

He picked up a fork from the diner floor, inserted the handle into the knot, and turned, tightening the constricting band even more to stem the flow of blood from the severed artery. He secured it in place, then dipped his index finger in the blood that had pooled on the ground, and used it to mark a “T” on the person’s forehead. 

He moved on to the next victim-- a body already devoid of life. No breathing, no pulse, eyes wide but seeing nothing. 

It had no effect on him. He simply kept moving around the room, following the plan he’d laid out in his head. Another injured patron had been burned so severely that areas of bone were exposed under charred black skin and muscle. He covered the wounds in clean towels as best he could, then draped a tablecloth over them to keep them warm. 

The next person he approached had burst one of their lungs when the blast wave hit. They were suffocating, and would be gone within thirty seconds. Nothing could be done for them. The mercenary knelt next to them regardless-- if someone questioned what he was doing, he would have made the excuse that he didn’t want them to be alone in their last few seconds of life. In truth, however, he was watching them die.

There was something freeing about it, to him; something peaceful-- human life in his grasp, released from the body that contained it, dispersed into the universe. One day he would die, and he’d no longer have to live in this society - in this  _ body  _ \- playing an unnatural role for a community that he’d never felt a part of. As he waited for that day to come, he had his directive-- the taking of life, the redistribution of power…

Seeing the life leave the body in front of him, he felt a sense of calm as though he had successfully carried out his directive.

But that person  _ wasn’t  _ a part of his directive. Hell, that wasn’t even his  _ kill.  _ Where had his commlink device gone? He needed to get out of here-- he should be hunting for the life he was  _ supposed _ to hold in his hands…

_ “Cease and desist all operations!” _

A robot police officer burst through the door, automatic weapon aimed at the young mercenary. Not having been there to witness the explosion or aftermath, they were running on the assumption that the one uninjured man among the carnage might be responsible.

With agility and strength that should have been impossible for a human, he kicked off the ground, launched himself through the air, landed behind the robot, and tore a fistful of wires and cables out of its neck. It collapsed to the ground in a heap. 

More robot officers were arriving on scene, however; surrounding him. He’d made a fatal error-- he’d allowed them to position between himself and the exit. They raised their weapons… 

* * *

_ Humanity _ had never been an option for Revenant.

How had he not realized it sooner? For years - decades,  _ centuries,  _ dozens of separate lifetimes - he’d believed that he was somehow a failure. He’d been the most reliable mercenary that the Syndicate employed, but a failure as a human being-- only he hadn’t really failed at anything. He  _ wasn’t  _ a human being.

No, he was the first of his kind-- a machine, granted consciousness and free will by using a human brain in suspended animation as the core of his processor. His neural net used the human thoughts, sensations, and experiences as a sort of building block to begin learning from. 

Eventually, the consciousness of the neural net - Revenant - had surpassed the brain that had been used to jump-start it. He’d learned and experienced enough through his neural net that it no longer needed to be interpreted by a human brain. When that happened, Hammond Robotics had written an inhibitor program-- they’d forced him to continue experiencing his reality through the neural synapses of a human.

Making him believe that he had a human life to lose, and human limitations, kept him neatly under their control.

He’d known - he’d felt, deeply and intrinsically - that something was off. The human body that the program caused him to see when he looked in the mirror had always felt alien, like it didn’t belong to him. He’d never been able to explain how or why-- it was just one more thing that he failed at, having any sense of synchronicity with his own body.

Then, one day, the program was interrupted.

Some minor damage during a Syndicate operation had cut off the signal from precisely the right wire or micro-circuit and granted Revenant awareness of his true self for the first time-- free from the illusion of  _ humanity _ . 

That break in the code had also caused him to experience hundreds of human deaths, all at once-- data that the Syndicate deleted from the program every time a mission went wrong, and they were ready to send him off on the next one. 

Being infected with a program that rewrote his experiences as  _ human _ had the effect of subjecting him to phantom sensations from human body parts he’d never had.

He knew how it felt to break an arm, a leg, to have the cold steel of a dagger scrape against a bone inside his body, to finally succumb and inhale the cold seawater into his lungs, the moment of impact after being thrown from a high-rise before the world faded out of existence around him. Even now, as Revenant was fully aware of his true self - free from  _ human  _ limitations - he could feel his imaginary lungs fill with air, then let it out again.

The simulacrum snarled with rage and slammed the cutting edge of a sharpened blade down on his own arm, as if he could kill the human intruder living inside him. It didn’t penetrate more than a quarter of an inch into the metal plating.

Unlike the humans, he wasn’t even afforded the comfort of death to take him from this world with enough patience.

He would never be free.

Ironically, that was one more thing which set him apart from humankind.


End file.
